THE SACRIFICE OF AGKICULTURE 171 



Acres. 



First-class agricultural land 48,000,000 



Second-class agricultural land " uncultivated " . . . 16,000,000 

 Mountains, waters, roads, etc 13,000,000 



Total .... 77,000,000 



The highly productive nature of the " cultivated " area, 

 48,000,000 acres, is too well known to need further reference 

 at this stao;e, so we will deal first with the 16 million acres 

 of what Government terms " heath, grazing, and uncultivated 

 land," which is just the soil that one may see from any carriage 

 window as the train passes through the country. 



Taking London as a centre and radiating therefrom to any 

 point of the compass, this "uncultivated" land may be met 

 with by thousands and tens of thousands of acres in every 

 direction. " Heath, grazing, and uncultivated land " is, alas, 

 in many counties, the prominent feature in the landscape. 

 This is the land, which, added together, totals the enormous 

 area of 16 million of acres. 



This vast uncultivated area equals the total cultivated area 

 of three of the smaller States of Europe, namely, Belgium, 

 Holland, and Denmark, all of which supply this coiintri) loith 

 considerable qiiantities of dairy produce and other forms of food. 



Familiar "Waste" Land 



This " heath, grazing, and uncultivated " land may be found 

 in every direction and under varying conditions, in vast tracts 

 in isolated places, or cheek by jowl with first-class arable 

 land, separated only from extreme productiveness by the thin 

 dividing hedge or stone wall. It creeps up to the fertile kitchen 

 gardens of well-to-do people in newly developed townships ; 

 it is sometimes " caught " by enterprising nurserymen in the 

 vicinity of provincial towns and converted into richly cultivated 

 nurseries, and it enters so frequently into the domestic economy 

 of many lives as to clearly demonstrate the really enormous 

 potentialities which lie in and about this vast area. 



In other words, these millions of acres have hitherto remained 

 a negligible quantity because it has been the fashion to believe 

 that they were of no value as factors in the general scheme 

 of national economy. " God bless my soul ! " exclaims your 

 unthinking citizen, " you must be mad to think of bringing 

 this enormous area of waste land under the plough, when three- 

 fourths of our best land are already under grass, and a great 

 deal more remains uncultivated because it does not pay to 

 till it." 



